Badlands (Orchestra)

When as a young man I tried writing a novel it opened with a scene from my childhood, a visit to the Cabazon dinosaurs, two life-sized recreations of enormous extinct beasts standing sentinel in a lonely desert near Palm Springs. Imagine my surprise when a few years later I picked up Sam Shepard’s Motel Chronicles and discovered it began with a version of the same scene! This remarkable coincidence led me to set texts from his collections Motel Chronicles and Hawk Moon for voice and bass clarinet in 2007. Unfortunately the piece failed, so in 2024 I returned to rewrite and orchestrate it as part of my palimpsest series for an orchestra of low instruments with baritone solo, a twenty minute cycle including five text settings with an instrumental interlude.